Recipes: Grilled

May 30, 2011

Roy Choi, the mastermind behind the Kogi BBQ taco trucks in Los Angeles is fabulous with mixing up culture and cuisine. His new Culver City restaurant, A-Frame, is in a former IHOP, hence the name. The food is polyglot Los Angeles. It commingles ingredients and culinary concepts that were born in different places on the planet but somehow met and married in the City of Angels. Choi tells the story of modern multiculturalism in his food.

One of the memorable things I tasted was Choi’s kimchi sour cream, which he served as a dip for sweet potato fries. The kimchi sour cream is a riff on ranch dressing, but with just a hint of tang and garlic. You barely detect the Korean edge but it does subtly let itself be known.

Now that we’re firmly in grilling season, I decided to make my own rendition of Choi’s kimchi sour cream and serve it with grilled vegetables. I’ve tried it with artichokes and asparagus. Both were fabulous. I imagine you could grill summer squash such as zucchini, patty pans, or crook neck. I suppose you could call it an Asian ranch dressing and put it on a salad!

May 23, 2011

My dear friend Linda came down from San Francisco for an impromptu lunch yesterday. I was too tired from having finished the Asian Tofu manuscript (hurray!) to make an elaborate meal for us. I needed something quick and easy.

Linda loves big flavor and chile heat. My solution was in a lovely bunch of lemon basil (bai maeng-lak) that I’d purchased on Saturday from the Hmong vendor at our farmer’s market. If you’re not familiar with lemon basil, get a hold of some.

This is the fresh herb season and I typically overdose on lemon basil. Their delicate, light green leaves are slightly peppery with elements of lemongrass, basil, and mint. Lemon basil is not widely used in Vietnamese cooking as we have herbs such as kinh gioi and tia to. (See the Herb Primer for details.) However, lemon basil is used in other Southeast Asian cuisines. For example, the Thais employ it in soup with shrimp. (I recently it on a crostini topped with the sardine in spicy tomato sauce.)

August 22, 2010

The sun decided to make an appearance this past week in Santa Cruz for longer than just a couple of hours a day! I was unfortunately stuck in my office reviewing edits on a writing project. After finishing on Friday, it time for a real weekend.

To start things off, Rory opened up a liter bottle of a dry Riesling and I made Thai grilled chicken (gai yang). Mymenu choice was inspired by two things: (1) the jar of Thai sweet chile sauce I recently made and (2) memories of a fabulous rendition of gai yang at Sailors Thai, a renowned restaurant in Sydney, Australia.

I had basically given up on ordering cloyingly sweet grilled chicken at Thai restaurants, but my dining buddy that evening, Bangkok-based journalist Jarrett Wrisley, convinced me to order the signature Thai dish. He was prescient in saying, “If this is a good Thai restaurant, they should at least do this well.”

We were startled by how good the gai yang was at Sailors Thai. Jarrett and I politely fought each other over every last bit of flesh and tangy-spicy sauce.

Sailors Thai was started by David Thompson, the chef/owner of Michelin starred nahm at the Halkin hotel in London and the soon-to-open outpost at the Metropolitan in Bangkok. David is one of the foremost authorities on Thai cuisine. He is feisty in nature and uncompromising in his cooking. Over the years, he has elevated Thai food to a high level of craftsmanship and respect that it deserves.

Thompson’s cookbooks, Thai Food andThai Street Food are phenomenal works. Thai Food is one of my reference books and I used it to work up this gai yang recipe, which is frankly super easy.

Hardline traditionalists would use a small chicken (think game hen size) but I opted for chicken-leg and-thigh quarters. They are juicy, cost less, and taste great.

Brush the sweet chile sauce on at the end or serve it on the side. Do both, if you like. You can’t lose.

July 02, 2010

If people dislike okra, it's usually because of its mucilaginous (read: slimy) nature. I know okra as a bright addition to tart-sweet Vietnamese seafood soups and an earthy fried Indian side dish. In those Asian preparations, okra doesn’t reveal its gummy nature. Rather, you savor its ridged skin and little round seeds. You marvel at its lovely spoke structure and graceful appearance.

Okra is native to Africa but traveled to India at some very early
point
in time; no one is sure when that happened. In the 19th century, okra found itself in Southeast Asia and it moved on to China after that.

The pod has a mild flavor and plays well with other ingredients. It’s also a relatively expensive vegetable most of the year. For those reasons, it rarely has a starring role and is often cooked with other ingredients.

Summer is okra season as the warmer months coax their tropical nature and foster growth. The quality of the pods during summer is spectacular. Last week, at the India Cash and Carry market in San Jose, CA, a group of women huddled around a particularly fresh box of unblemished okra, picking their purchase one pod at a time. My husband noticed the group and jumped right in. He ended up with 1 1/2 pounds of gorgeous okra.

May 07, 2010

Banana leaf is not merely nature’s placemat. Asian cooks use it like plastic wrap, foil, and parchment paper. The beauty of using banana leaf is that it imparts a wonderful tea-leaf like scent to food during the cooking process. It’s kinda like the Southeast Asian version of French cooking en papillote (in paper)!

In the Vietnamese kitchen, banana leaf perfumes silky sausages and headcheese and many dumplings. But we seldom wrap large whole fish in banana leaf and grill it like our Southeast Asian brothers and sisters tend to do. Fresh lotus leaves, which are huge and easy to wrap with, is more typically used. Or, you use mud to encase the whole fish, usually freshwater snakehead fish (ca loc in Vietnamese). Or, you just grill the fish in a wire frame basket.

But who has fresh lotus leaves and mud at their disposal? Or the right size wire basket? Not me.

The other night, I thought of a wonderful lunch of grilled whole fish that I enjoyed with Robyn Eckhardt and David Hagerman in Kuala Lumpur in 2008. It was served with a briny-spicy-sweet dipping sauce made of funky shrimp paste, sweet kecap manis soy sauce, and chiles. A terrific harmony of Malaysian ingredients.

Wanting to recapture those flavors, I found a similar recipe in Christopher Tan’s Singaporean cookbook, Shiok! Chris is among the leading experts on Southeast Asian foodways and I trust him immensely. His ikan panggang recipe was modestly called “Barbecued Fish” in English. The flavors were fabulously big. I’ve adapted Chris’s recipe here for you.